Love, Love, Love

There was this one time in the early 80s when my sister and I rocked-out to\n\ Parallel Lines on ...

There was this one time in the early 80s when my sister and I rocked-out to Parallel Lines on the front porch of our NJ home. I was maybe seven. During a rousing "Heart of Glass", a kid walked past and yelled, "Disco sucks!" That hurt my feelings. I wasn't a real disco fan, of course; I was too young to claim any kind of connoisseur status and listened to whatever my older sister and her friends passed to me, but this guy's invasive badmouthing bugged me. At the time it deflated an otherwise idyllic moment, but now when I think about his monolithic proclamation what bothers me most is that his lame genre-specificity points towards a small-minded view of music in which rock and disco exist as discreet objects pinned down by a few obvious signifiers. I mean, come on, neighborhood kid! As if one excludes or precludes the other! And as if either is purely a style! Shit intersects...

Enter Glass Candy. Ida No (vocals), Ginger Peach (drums), and Johnny Jewel (guitar) have totally bad porn names and their heavy-handed take on the past isn't convincing or disarming, but with recent rave reviews by historical amnesiacs, a flurry of seven-inches on K and Troubleman, a live one-sided twelve-inch on Vermin Scum, some other difficult-to-find releases, and an upcoming cover story in Jane, they just might be the next big thing.

The cover of Love Love Love, their 25-minute debut LP, depicts an intentionally blurred image of vocalist Ida No (rhymes with Karen O!) staring at the listener in a sort of sedated daze. The eye contact is very Parallel Lines, but Deborah Harry was more intense and seemed to be for real. Continuing the theme of anachronistic appropriation, No sports a black and white (or black and pink?) top, 80s hairdo, and is superimposed over a pink-tinted Portland skyline, her image partially obscured by the remnants of a pink lightning bolt striking from the heavens on a different panel. I'm not sure if this is to be accepted as a sign of interstellar transmigration. Maybe It's like that Oscar Wilde thing in Velvet Goldmine?

No's passé pose in front of the cleanest city in which I've ever lived is interestingly iconic for the recent mushrooming of twenty-something bands obsessed with (whether they know it or not) James Chance & The Contortions, DNA, Lydia Lunch, and the recently revived Theoretical Girls. In the 1980s no wave emerged largely from the gritty downtown NYC art and loft scenes as disco, new wave, and punk came together and jammed a bit. As superficially as the new crop of "death disco" or post-punk bands sounds like their forbears, the nihilism and desire to destroy paradigms that spurred no wave has seemingly been conveniently repackaged as little more than a dandified fashion statement.

Glass Candy are fun, but the manner in which they co-opt a storehouse of iconography is pathological. Of the eight tracks on the record, six are originals. "Hurt", the best song of the lot, is a revised version of synth-punk band The Screamers' "I Wanna Hurt", and the soulless reworking of the Rolling Stones' "Last Time" is passable, but nowhere near as compelling as Cat Power made "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction". All this amid the passe smoke machines, checkered ties, 70s haze, and candy font. If nothing else shouldn't these revivalists key their own mixed metaphors? Or at least exploit the shit with a smarter sense of depth?

The most successful purveyor of over-the-top "art-rock" is the underrated Wynne Greenwood of Tracy & The Plastics. Live, through her use of self-reflexive video in which she stars as three "distinct" personality types, she turns her ecstatic new wave/disco/punk into an obvious performance complete with complex meta-narrative. Not only that, she has that Diamanda-Galas-esque voice to interestingly propel her dense song constructions (which also ransack hard rock and metal, but in a much more subtle way than the heavy-handed Glass Candy). Ida No, however, lacks Greenwood's vocal dexterity, and in her no-wave attempts to move beyond tune or tonality ends up sounding like some hipster doing Karaoke to Nina Hagen at some electro-clash night at some bar in Brooklyn. On a purely technical level, No is similar to Mariah Carey, pulling out all the tropes and just kind of yelling according to a pre-prescribed genre-specific passion.

Within an already heavily footnoted genre, Glass Candy are laden by reference points. Like a self-indulgent short story by David Foster Wallace or some Borgesian tale questioning originality and authorship, this simulacrum lacks the pure immediacy of the original, turning what was at one point a kick in the ass of 80s materialism into an empty pose-- something to which you can dance absentmindedly, wondering if the asymmetrical hairdo you just paid $150 for looks vaguely authentic.